Blue Velvet
by Tinhen
Summary: Somehow, the fact the shrink is a complete fraud makes him feel better about the whole being-on-trial-for-rape thing. Except when the guy starts prattling on about demons. Outsider POV, plus Dean.


**Blue Velvet**

_Summary_: Somehow, the fact the shrink is a complete fraud makes him feel better about the whole being-on-trial-for-rape thing. Except when the guy starts prattling on about demons. Outsider POV, plus Dean.

"I'm not sure what it is you want to know," nineteen-year-old Ryan Wright says, looking right on through the psychologist. The man's cheek twitches and he sits down across the table.

"I'm Frank Booth," the guy says, and he loosens his tie like it's some pitbull's choke collar. Those three syllables come out in a voice that seems oddly nasal, pinched off, too high-pitched, but it's the name itself that does it. Ryan actually focuses on him then; he takes in that the guy looks about thirty, though with a put-away-wet-ness about him that says he's probably a bit younger, and he doesn't hold himself like any kind of doctor Ryan's ever met. Growing up the son of a powerful lawyer whose idea of parenting was a pill to make it better introduced Ryan Wright to a lot of doctors.

Somehow, the fact this guy's so obviously and wonderfully a fake makes Ryan feel something for the first time since the twang of shock when that Northwestern University Police Department officer informed him that he was being accused of rape. It's on the tip of his tongue to be snarky, to tell the good doctor to just piss off and let him rot. But the look on the psychologist's face makes Ryan hold his tongue and he's surprised to note that he feels some nice, hot alarm at just the idea of feeling something.

He hasn't felt anything since the first week of March, when his RA knocked on his door with her boss and a cop in tow, and they asked him where was he on some night in October, how does he know Amy Phelan, and does he have a compelling reason as to why Amy Phelan seems to have it in her head that he raped her? Ryan vividly remembers just blinking at them like they were speaking in tongues (wait, who's Amy Phelan? You mean the crazy blonde girl down the hall?), and then he's in handcuffs, and then he's in jail, and then it's May and he's in the courtroom, still bewildered, and he sees Amy Phelan for the first time since, oh, January and now she's eight months pregnant.

Eight months ago was the end of October, the Theta Chi '50s theme party; no one seems to buy that he wasn't drinking that night, and it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that if Amy Phelan was sober enough that night to be fingering him for something he blacked out for, then he's the violated party (except, if his memory is as good as it was back in high school, the Amy Phelan of October was a hot little blonde and fuck, a hot girl can't rape the willing, and that's enough right there to convince Ryan himself that he commit the crime). Still, Ryan likes to think that he'd remember hitting an ass like the Amy Phelan of October had. He just doesn't.

"So," the guy calling himself Booth says, "black eyes."

Ryan shrugs. Suddenly they're on a street he's had to walk down one too many times with various cops, lawyers, detectives. "Don't remember anything," he says dully.

"Makes sense."

"No," Ryan tells him, "it doesn't."

The guy smiles, and he's got the same kind of ladykiller smile that Ryan has. The kind of smile that lands a guy on trial for rape if he isn't careful. "No, man, it really, really does." The smile fades and he takes a battered notepad out of his inner pocket. He unthreads a ballpoint from the wire binding and makes eye contact with Ryan. "What's the last thing you remember?"

Ryan looks at him oddly, but pulls himself forcibly out of the _je ne sais quoi oh my god just lethal-inject me or something already please_ slouch he's been in since they first read him his Mirandas. There's something compelling about this fake doctor that makes him want to speak. And so he talks.

All he knows for sure is last October he went to a theme party with some friends from his high school lacrosse team, a couple of decent guys who aren't really bright but would do anything for each other. Their coach had been a megalomaniac fuckbrick, and they bonded under the man's abuse. Ryan doesn't like the taste of beer, so he didn't have anything alcoholic to drink. One of his friends was wearing one of those cone-shaped birthday party hats. After watching about the eighth round of beer pong between steadily drunker frat brothers, he headed upstairs to the bathroom to check that his Jailhouse Rock Elvis hairstyle was still intact and maybe break his own seal on the Coke he'd been sucking down all night. He had his dick in his hands when he smelled struck matches and rotten meat and he remembers cutting his piss short to glance around. The next thing he remembers is waking up in his dorm room across campus the next afternoon (his alarm clock has a date function) a little queasy, but with that pleasant _I-got-laid_ feeling pooled around the base of his spine. And he still had to urinate.

The doctor scribbles on his little notepad the whole time Ryan speaks.

"Why are you here now, Dr. Booth?" he asks after wrapping up his story.

Booth glances up the corners of the room, at the two CCTV cameras opposite the windowed wall. He stands up and goes over to the chainlink-reinforced window. Ryan can just see the lake in the distance, and it feels like it's the other side of the moon. "Black eyes. Amy Phelan's roommate said something in her testimony about black eyes."

Ryan remembers that day in court, last week. He's spent most of the trial slouched down in his chair, staring at the ceiling with a pen balanced on the bridge of his nose, but the day Amy Phelan's roommate said "sclera" he sat up and paid attention.

The roommate takes the stand for the prosecution, but her testimony doesn't ring like a damnation. She mentions that Ryan always seemed to her like a decent guy, the kind who holds doors for everyone and says hello (and means it) even to nerdy guys and fat girls. Maybe a little off, the roommate allows, like given twenty or thirty years he might veer into dirty-old-man territory, but not yet. Ryan can't be bothered to remember the roommate's name, but he definitely remembers the confused look that comes over her mousey little face when she mentions the way Amy Phelan described Ryan's eyes right after the incident.

"Completely black," the girl says. Ryan's lawyer, the slick-talking asshole his dad sent up from the city, takes this to mean that the pupils were dilated even though Ryan has said repeatedly that he wasn't intoxicated. But the roommate shakes her head. "No," she says firmly. "Not like that. Like the sclera was black, too, even though that's crazy, right?"

Technically, that part of her testimony is hearsay and isn't really admissible. The prosecutor, a fat little woman who's spent the trial smelling Ryan's blood in the water like a hammerhead, is too off-guard caught to object, and Ryan's lawyer continues with his cross like the eye thing never came up at all.

All Ryan can think of, as the roommate sits there and fidgets and shoots him vaguely apologetic looks between reluctantly (and doggedly, in the face of the defense's vicious questions) vouching for Amy Phelan's character, is that the sclera of his eyes turning black sounds about as crazy as smelling sulfur and then blacking out for almost twenty-four hours, and then opening your door room door to rape charges five months later. It doesn't sound crazy at all, but he's so far down the river at this point that seeing the Anti-Christ in a bunny-suit wouldn't particularly strike him as odd.

Ryan squints up at Booth, who's backlit by the gray sky outside, and finds that the man is flipping backwards through the little notepad, frowning. A vertical scar pops up on his forehead, and for a second he looks impossibly old and very doctorlike indeed. Then he glances at Ryan, catches his expression, and shoots him a grin that might be called silly under pretty much any other circumstances. Then he looks back at the pad, taps the pen, frowns some more.

"What do you know about the victim, Amy Phelan?" Booth asks finally, not looking up.

This is another familiar question. Ryan's only answered it eighty-two thousand times since February, so what's another go around with a fake shrink?

"She's this six-foot-tall blonde who lived in East Fairchild, the CRC building. Third floor like me. Stacked, pretty face, you know. Practically an eleven, 'cept that everybody agreed she was fucknuts. As in: whimsical in the head, y'know?"

Booth raises his eyebrows. "Crazy?"

Ryan actually barks out a laugh that makes the doctor cringe a little in that ill-fitting Blues Brothers suit. "Fucked her way through the second floor by the end of first week of classes, including one of the RAs." He bares his teeth this time, but there isn't any smile involved. For some reason, he feels all fired up, too, just happy somebody's listening. "If you ask me, that dude's way skeevier than me—and I admit it, I'm pretty skeevy sometimes—and, fuck, I bet you any money he's that baby's father. But it's more convenient, when you're a crazy bitch, to point the finger at some other guy and get a little media attention. We're all at NU for a reason and it ain't the cheap tuition. It's Medill, the J-school. We're all journalist whores."

"You think she's lying about the rape to get attention?"

Ryan shrugs, slumping down in his seat, deflated. It sounds like he's guilty now, blaming the victim because the light's getting dimmer and dimmer where he's sitting. "No, not really."

"But you don't remember anything?"

"What I remember," Ryan says in a long-suffering tone as he stares at the pitted tabletop in front of him, "is smelling sulfur and rotten meat in an upstairs bathroom at Theta Chi, and then it's the next day."

Booth makes a clicking sound in his throat and Ryan glances up. Booth is standing at an angle so that his back is to both cameras, and he's holding the notebook in front of him. I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED IT WASNT YOUR FAULT, is scribbled in a cramped, spidery scrawl with no punctuation. Booth flips the page. The next one is blank.

"Um—" Ryan starts to say something but all the words shrivel up in his throat. Doesn't really matter. Booth starts talking himself.

"What do other people remember about that night, about how you were acting?" he asks. Ryan knows the guy probably has a pretty good idea, has reviewed the case even if he isn't a real psychologist, and is here for a pretty damn fucking good reason. But he humors the guy because he has to hold up his end. Anyway, he's already shown some life and there's no backing out of that now.

"The guy I was hoping would be my Big, Andy—he was on the stand right after Amy Phelan's roommate—said I seemed pretty normal. Maybe a little tense, a little bit off, but normal. Witness for the defense and all."

Ryan thinks Andy Moriarty is an asshole blowhard struck from the same mold as Ryan's father and older brothers, but he's an in at the frat and Ryan's too paralyzingly lazy to search out his own paths. Always has been. Possibly one of the reasons he's on trial for rape, right there: just too damn lazy to avoid it.

"He said I wasn't drunk," Ryan continues. "I'm the whiny little bitch who won't drink Natty, and that's all they had that night. So I didn't drink. And I didn't get hit on the head, so—"

Booth is holding up the notepad again, subtly, so that the people who are playing voyeur to this little exchange aren't privy. IT WAS A DEMON, the notepad says. NO LIE. The last two words are underlined twice.

Booth flips the page. YOU WERE POSSESSED.

Ryan can't help it. He laughs. This time it's a proper, honest-to-Jesus laugh that brings tears to his eyes while snatching away all the air in his lungs. He throws back his head, gasping for breath, and when he looks back, Booth has retaken the seat across from him and has a smile on his face.

"Black eyes, sulfur…" Booth whispers, so low the microphones won't catch it. Ryan very nearly doesn't. The man's lips don't even move.

"Was Amy Phelan at the frat party?" Booth asks out loud.

"Nope. Apparently, I met her on the front steps to Fairchild, followed her in. Followed her upstairs, into her room. And, apparently, I held her down and raped her right here on her blue bedspread. It's all in the case files."

Booth pockets the notepad, brow still furrowed, forehead scar in sharp relief compared to the rest of his face.

"They don't have very much evidence, you know," Ryan says suddenly, feeling it bubbling up like baking soda in a vinegar cocktail. "Amy Phelan showered before she reported the crime to her RA, douched away any evidence. They could tell she'd had sex that night, and that it was rough, but there wasn't any semen. She needed stitches. She was bruised."

The prosecutor had cheerfully projected the evidence photos on a screen, ten feet tall, like she couldn't see how it affected poor, undeniably violated Amy Phelan in the first row of the gallery. Ten-foot blowups of wounds, private hurts, the worst moment of an eighteen-year-old girl's life. Whoever had forced Amy Phelan to have sex had left visible finger marks around her neck and collarbones, although the bruises didn't match up with Ryan's hands. The girl had left the courtroom in tears. The prosecutor didn't seem to realize her misstep.

"My lawyer," Ryan confides, "thinks I'm going to get off anyway. Technicality or something."

"Then why the grumpy gills act?" Booth asks, leaning back in his own chair, looking for all the world like he's been the punk kid on the flattering orange jumpsuit a few times himself.

"Because it doesn't matter if I actually did it or not, or… like, if my body did it while a demon was in possession of it, or whatever," Ryan tells him, lips halfway between frown and smirk. "My life's still fucked; the life that I get to live out, without some hell-dwelling passenger. Some girl crying rape at me—a girl I totally could see myself fucking anyway—that's going to haunt me for the rest of my life, Doc."

Just then, Booth stands and moves towards the door, twitching like he's got a fast path to beat. He falters halfway between the doorknob and the chair he just vacated and looks back. "Ain't it fun when the truth don't matter?" he asks, his voice dropping half an octave and picking up an accent Ryan might place as Texan. The voice suddenly fits the face.

"Thank you, Mr. Hopper," Ryan tells him, smirking. The doctor's out the door and it's closed behind him before the man's laughter reaches Ryan.

In the end, Ryan is acquitted.

There just isn't enough physical evidence and there are too many unanswered (and unanswerable) questions. For one thing, a week after Ryan talks to the fake psychologist, Amy Phelan gives birth to a baby girl who's obviously biracial and obviously not sharing any genetic material with sandy-haired Ryan.

The fake doctor comes to the reading of the verdict, wearing the same ugly suit, and he sits at the very back of the gallery. He nods to Ryan when they make eye contact, briefly, but his attention flickers away to somewhere else, and then the judge is asking the madam foreman if the jury has reached a verdict and they have, your Honor.

After the case is dismissed and his otherwise useless mother is sobbing into his shoulder in the hallway outside the courtroom, Ryan looks up. He sees one of the jurors, a gangly giant of a young man, walking with his Dr. Booth. They don't look pleased, exactly, not like Ryan's lawyer or father. They have identical looks of resignation on their faces, but the giant one says something and the smaller one grins.

As they pass, Ryan can just hear Booth cracking a joke, in that lower voice, "—know as much as I do, Sammy-boy. Possession's nine-tenths, even to demons."

END.

Author's note things:

Well, fuck if it hasn't been, like, two years since I've posted fic. I've got about 20,000 words of fic for sundry fandoms sitting on my hard drive, waiting patiently for me to get off my ass, finish, and post. I just couldn't.

And then my darling friend Beth introduced me to this fandom.

Also: you should go rent Lynch's _Blue Velvet_ post-haste. Dennis Hopper plays the perfect psychotic jackass, really. And the 80s haircuts aren't even that noticeable. If you could explain the party hat thing to me, though…

tinhen / posted 2.16.08


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